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Hollerith, Herman

American Inventor and Engineer
1860–1929

Born on February 29, 1860, in Buffalo, New York, Herman H. Hollerith was a prolific inventor and a pioneer in data processing. His punched-card tabulating machines, although primitive by modern standards, provided the first viable method of processing vast amounts of information in a timely and cost-effective way. When he died on November 17, 1929, he left behind a technology that, with continued improvement, would eventually lead to the development of the modern computer.

Hollerith was the son of German immigrants and one of five children. His father died in an accident when Hollerith was only seven, and to support the family, his mother kept a millinery shop, making one-of-a-kind hats for ladies of fashion. At barely nineteen, Hollerith graduated with distinction from Columbia University's School of Mines. One of his professors, who was also a consultant for the U.S. Bureau of the Census, introduced Hollerith to Dr. John Shaw Billings, head of Vital Statistics, who hired the young engineer to assist in the statistical analysis of the 1880 census. Over dinner one evening, Billings discussed the tabulating process and wondered whether it could be mechanized, a question that fired Hollerith's imagination and transformed his life.

Although Hollerith left Washington, D.C., in 1882 to become an instructor of mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he never abandoned the concept of automated tabulation. At MIT, he developed the basic ideas for his machine and the flair for invention that would ultimately result in thirty-one patents.

In 1883 Hollerith received an appointment as an assistant examiner in the U.S. Patent Office and returned to Washington, D.C. As an engineer and statistician, he knew little, if anything, about patent law, but as a fledgling inventor he understood its importance. Eager to learn, he used his three years at the Patent Office to develop a real expertise.

On September 23, 1884, Hollerith filed the first patent application for his tabulating machine. His initial design approach used rolls of perforated paper tape, but these were soon replaced by punched cards. Years before, he had watched a train conductor punch tickets that contained brief descriptions of each passenger, including hair and eye color. On the basis of this recollection, he adopted the punched card as a standardized unit for recording and processing information.

Punched cards had been introduced in the textile industry more than a century earlier by Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752–1834), who had designed a mechanical loom. In Jacquard's loom, the hooks lifting the warp threads were controlled by cards perforated to the desired pattern. Hollerith's system used a similar approach but added a new ingredient—electricity. Information was recorded by punching holes on a card with twenty-four vertical columns and twelve punching places in each one. The cards were punched, sorted, and fed by hand into a machine, where electrical contacts were made through the holes as the cards passed through. Selected data were counted on electromechanical tabulators.

Hollerith's card processing system was first used in 1886 to tabulate census returns in Baltimore, Maryland, and subsequently in New Jersey and New York City. In 1889, when automated data tabulation systems were evaluated for the 1890 census, the Hollerith Electrical Tabulating Machine won the assignment. Consequently, the 1890 census was counted twice as fast as the previous one, and more than a billion holes were punched to record information from 63 million people.

For independent studies in developing Hollerith's tabulating system, the Columbia School of Mines waived its usual requirements and awarded Hollerith a doctor of philosophy degree in 1890. On September 15 of that year, he married Lucia Talcott, the daughter of a noted civil engineer. The couple had six children: Lucia; Herman, Jr.; Charles; Nan; Richard; and Virginia.

During the decades that followed, Hollerith continued to modify and improve his machines, which were used again in the 1900 census. By that time, they were used in Europe as well. To maximize commercial opportunities, he formed the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896 and successfully promoted his machines to insurance companies, department stores, and railroads.

In 1911 the Tabulating Machine Company became part of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, a small conglomerate that was renamed the International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation in 1924. Hollerith continued as a consultant and director until 1914, when he retired to a farm in Virginia's Tidewater country. On November 17, 1929 he died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-nine, but his concept, although improved over the years, remained the basis of the information processing industry well into the 1940s.